Interview with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza in Nature

The genetic map maker. Read the whole thing, but this is interesting:

How did you feel about being accused of racism?

Well, many mistakes are made and that was a very curious one. I'd argued for decades that the concept of 'race' defined by external characteristics -- such as skin colour, size variations or facial fat -- is nonsense. These visible characteristics evolved under natural selection, mostly to cope with local environments, and have no deeper base. [my emphasis -r]

Hm. That's interesting. In his magisterial The History and Geography of Human Genes Cavalli-Sforza sketched out the phylogeny of our species. Here he is pointing out that many salient physical features are overlain on top of genealogical substratum. I've made this point recently myself, but as usual Cavalli-Sforza has anticipated me!

Here is my interview with Cavalli-Sforza from last year.

Tags

More like this

Can I request a post about James Watson's latest? Some of your sciblings have posted..

razib already has such a post here, on his old blog.

You should check it out - a lot of stuff goes up on that blog that never sees the light of day on this one.

By Caledonian (not verified) on 17 Oct 2007 #permalink

Hmm...out of curiosity, how do you split your postings and decide what gets (cross) posted where?

Show me an activist and I'll show you an arsehole.

By Sandgroper (not verified) on 17 Oct 2007 #permalink

For all the talk of old fashioned racial categories I don't really see the studies clustering autosomal DNA into trees, population FST distance tables etc. as really being at odds with the old Caucasoid / Negroid / Mongoloid model at all. I think saying that that the old science is discredited is more politics than science. Sure we know that there are things that don't follow the "major races" line like lactose tolerance, but people like Coon were never claiming that such things didn't exist so it's somewhat of a straw man.

If we were just any other animal then I'm pretty sure that we'd be classified into Homo sapiens caucasoid, Homo sapiens mongoloid etc. just as we have Canis lupus arctos and Canis lupus baileyi. The whole lumping of everyone into Homo sapiens sapiens with the only other known subspecies Homo sapiens idaltu conveniently all dead is not, in my opinion, consistent with our treatment of other animals. It is politics.

Sure we can say it's all clines and so on and there's no such thing as a "race", but is that any more rational than saying that there are no such things as mountains just variations in land gradient? That Mount Everest is just a social construct and that the existence of things which geographers cannot decide to classify as mountains rather than mere hills or as a mountain with two peaks as opposed to two adjacent mountains means that all this talk about things called mountains is nonsense?

Do all the people who say that there are no such things as races write to complain to the World Wildlife Fund that they shouldn't worry about trying to preserve the Siberian tiger because it is not a species but a mere subspecies?

This whole subspecies, species, cline argument is actually of great practical concern in the case of the Red Wolf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Wolf#Taxonomy

as really being at odds with the old Caucasoid / Negroid / Mongoloid model at all. I

there are differences on the margins. e.g., ainu. also, the old model based on morphology got the evolutionary phylogenetics wrong (many, e.g., coon, believed that the east asians were an outgroup to the african-european clade. this is wrong).

Actually, I think he's just being politically correct. More than anything else.

Of course Coon got things wrong. The Races of Europe was published 65 years ago, Darwin got things wrong. This is what we can expect from science that old. I'm sure that some conclusions in Cavalli Sforza's books will turn out to be wrong but the great and good don't decry him as "discredited" science like they do Coon.

I do not however see where his general phenotype based clusterings between *presently existing* populations have been "discredited" by genetics, which is the regular PC claim. That's what the "race does not exist" crowd are interested in demolishing, not his views on a multi-regional hypothesis. Not how the present races came to be but whether there are present races at all.

You pick out the Ainu, but I could pick out places where Coon went against prevailing general wisdom of his time and even the wisdom of today and got it right according to current genetics. For example most people even today think of Ethiopians and Somalis as simply "black". Coon, from his skull measurements, said no, these people are a roughly half and half intermediate between Negroid and Caucasoid. Genetics (e.g. see History and Geography of Human Genes page 174) has confirmed this when we chose to interpret things in the "major races" terms.

Coon also had explanations for things that modern genetics hasn't pinned down. For example his major thrust in Europe is of a robust Paleolithic type being displaced by a more gracile Mediterranean type with the spread of agriculture. The issue of the proportions of each type in the present day gene pool has not been settled by genetics, Cavalli Sforza and others going for a demic diffusion while others seeing it more as cultural rather than genetic transference. Frankly at this point I would trust Coon more than any of the contradictory genetic studies so far if I wanted to place a bet on the proportions involved. Coon's arguments make sense and I can see them with my own eyes to an extent. They also explain things that without this type of science are somewhat inexplicable, such as why the Guanches of the Canary Islands were often blond and Rif Berbers often redheads or blonds, I can even see this influence in the red hair of Morocco's Princess Lalla Salma. Without Coon I cannot explain these strange facts at all, because the geneticists have not yet reinvented the wheel. With him I understand them in a way that makes perfect sense.

If politics were no issue we would still be doing physical anthropology in the manner of Coon. No doubt Coon would be seen as outdated with the much greater knowledge we would have at this point in that field. We would be putting physical anthropology and genetics together and knowing more about the world with both than we would with just one. The moral disgust we have with people measuring heads with callipers and assigning to groups is not based on a legitimate concern for it being unscientific. The fact that we still permit people to indulge in it where a life and death matter may be at stake in the area of forensics kind of shows that. The fact that we have nowhere near as much of a problem with doing it with other animals also shows that. Subspecies are not scientific when we are discussing wolves and tigers and then suddenly unscientific when we are discussing humans. Like I said, I await the the flood of letters from the "race doesn't exist" crowd to the WWF concerning the Siberian tiger with interest.